Claire is low on energy, so she pops across the hall to Oliver’s pad for a pick-me up. Oliver, accustomed to his routine, dislikes interruptions during his jazz listening and mail waiting. She persists, he concedes, igniting a potentially explosive spark.
Never was a meet-cute as cute—and as quietly ominous—as it is in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending,” which opened Tuesday at the Belasco Theater. That’s because the pair are robots, and Claire’s battery is running down fast. Hooking her up to his charger may signal for Oliver the beginning of love. It may also signal the end of it.
The surprising double vision that makes “Maybe Happy Ending” a ravishing addition to the catalog of Broadway “nerdicals” is that we, as non-robots, connect, pair, and empower one another to share a too-brief lifetime. The term is high praise, honoring supersmart, usually small-scale shows—like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit,” and “Kimberly Akimbo”—that nevertheless have big emotional impact. Michael Arden’s breathtaking bravura in directing this show also earns it extra points for difficulty. Under the cover of sci-fi whimsy, it sneaks in a totally original human heartbreaker.
Hue Park and Will Aronson handle the sci-fi elements in the book lightly and humorously, avoiding the invidious scrutiny that the genre often elicits. By 2064, when their story takes place, Helperbots—android servants like embodied Siris—will have been assisting humans with daily tasks for decades. But Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J. Shen) are now obsolete, living out their days in a pleasant retirement home in Seoul as their operating systems become antiquated and replacement parts become scarce.
Still, they remain fully sentient and distinct. Oliver, an early model Helperbot 3, is more stylized and herky-jerky than Claire, a later model Helperbot 5. His lips are pursed, his feet splayed, his language not quite natural (he can’t stop saying “thank you”), and his hair a hard helmet like a Playmobil figurine’s. Even so, he spent enough years with his former owner, James Choi, to have absorbed some human analog tastes—the jazz LPs especially—and to miss him fiercely. Surely Choi (Marcus Choi, excellent) will reclaim him one day.
Claire is smoother, nearly convincingly human, in full command of snarky eye rolls and chic in a pleated gold skirt. Clint Ramos is responsible for creating the just-weird enough costumes for Claire. Claire is also wiser than Oliver and, perhaps inevitabObserving the human tendency to discard others—her recollections of the unhappy couple who once owned her play out like a Neorealist film—she understands that Choi will never arrive, regardless of how long Oliver waits for the mail. ng Oliver waits for the mail. And yet her greater facility with emotion prompts her to protect him from that awful knowledge.
None of this is mawkish; robots do not possess a sense of humor. The songs, composed by Aronson with lyrics by Park, are not the typical bombastic ballads found in Broadway love stories. Oliver and Claire get mostly upbeat, busy numbers, stylistically landing somewhere between Bacharach and Sondheim. That’s a lovely place to land.
Not that deeper emotion is avoided. In a clever touch that turns into much more, Gil Brentley, a Sinatra-like crooner who is Choi’s (and thus Oliver’s) favorite jazz singer, periodically makes appearances to offer insightful commentary in the style of the midcentury—20th century. In particular, Brentley (Dez Duron) starts and ends the show, accompanied by Aronson’s lush, string-heavy orchestrations, with the heartbreak song “Why Love,” offered first in regret and then in recommendation.
In between, Oliver and even cynical Claire travel. For them, however, the journey is a literal one, as Oliver chooses to search for his owner, and Claire feels compelled to accompany him. Given her status as a Helperbot 5, Claire is equipped with the ability to drive. A classic robot road trip ensues, with the two growing closer as they share adventures involving a ferry ride to an outlying Korean island, an overnight stay at a Motel Sexx, and an enchanted evening of fireflies in the forest.
“Maybe Happy Ending” is undoubtedly the most original musical to grace Broadway since 2022’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” another small story with big ideas and even bigger emotions. With gentle humor and pathos, Park and Aronson manage to tap into the most human of questions: Is it still worthwhile to love, knowing that pain and loss are inevitable? The show has a strong emotional impact. But judging by the resounding sniffles from our audience, there’s nothing artificial about this rare, tender gift of a musical.